Just letting you know what I'm up to. I'm taking the amazing new lighting engine and the sexy new models and updating all of the official maps. It's taking me ages because I'm adding so much detail to the maps, but it's great fun! I just added a hobo bin to Asylum!



And here's how many models I've used! If I'm going to have spent 2+ months coding models and advanced lighting into the game, I'm going to damn well make use of it!!

Looks great.

wow. amazing

I like this!

Took a few days off from map making to do optimisations. The maps with all the new lighting and models were taking quite a long time to load, but I think I've sped it up quite a bit now. This is partly through code optimisations, but also by making a few changes to some of my maps. Outside maps like Downtown and Barn have got big directional lights which have to illuminate every single tile in the map. This takes forever. So on these maps I've had to rework the lighting a bit, removing ambience on a few lights, shrinking the radiuses and removing phase 2 lighting. For those making community maps, just keep lighting as you do, but be aware that I might need to optimise the map a bit to speed it up. So far I've managed to double the loading speed bringing Asylum from 32s down to 14s on my laptop. That's with max graphics, and I'm on a laptop. Players can always opt for lower quality lighting to bring that down further, but I think 14s acceptable for now.

Put something in the download or just have Subvein analyze how long it'd take to load a map given a computer's settings. And first time you load up game, unless you've manually changed settings before then, it'll optimize to the user's comp. No one wants to wait more than 15 seconds or so to get into a game their first time. Later give them the option. Just a thought. I don't care about graphics too much. ;p I prefer load times to sexy lighting tbh.

Right there with you, I don't care about graphics either. I've always been about the gameplay. But for the vast majority of players graphics are what sell the game. And first impressions count. Funny thing is, even though I don't care about graphics they still have a huge impact on my first impression of a game. If I see a new game with beautiful graphics I know it's at least well developed, with probably polished gameplay. The gameplay could be really boring or unoriginal, but at least the devs must've had enough time/budget to polish it up a bit. Anyway that's why I've spent so long focussing of gfx for MF. I wiiiiiish I could be working on chemicals right now but no.. must be disciplined.

Definitely, just like make sure someone isn't waiting forever to load if they have an old comp. Lots of people come from countries with bad net or old comps so make sure peeps aren't waiting for fifteen minutes to get into the game. Especially in ranked, load times can not exceed like a minute.

Yup your words are wise and true. I've made even more optimisations now and got things speeding up quite a bit. I'm also going to be putting an arbitrary cap on the loading time for all the official maps, and ensuring they meet it. So I've had to remove dynamic map lighting from Barn and Downtown to get them fast enough. I'm a little concerned about Core tbh, but I think I can optimise it.

A quick hint for map makers. One of the optimisations I've made is if a light has ZERO ambience, it will load faster. But it needs to be zero. 0.01% ambience will take just as long as 50% ambience. It's only if it has no ambience at all that I can afford to skip the tiles entirely. Making the map look good comes first, but if you can get away with reducing the ambience on some of your tiles to 0 then that's good. This is usually better for indoor lights, like a light lighting up a long corridor, as the light naturally wouldn't pass through walls anyway. In outdoors or big open areas however the light is more likely to "bounce around" which is how ambience works in real life. Anyway don't worry about it too much cause I'll touch things up anyway.

Well, that's good to know, I'll make sure to reduce the lighting.. I've already tried my best to get rid of all unnecessary lights in Core anyways, I hope it's enough, but it's still a lot (60 lights), so...